Sun Leaks 6-core Intel Xeon, Nehalem Details

Re:Sun Leaks 6-core Intel Xeon, Nehalem Details by xirium on Monday February 25, 2008 @07:26PM (#123473)

"At the time of its release in December of 2005, a single chip, eight core, 32-thread, 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T1 server performed similarly to a two-socket, four-core, eight-thread, 1.9 GHz IBM POWER5 server, performed similarly to a four socket, eight-core, sixteen-thread 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon "Paxville MP" server, and exceeded the performance of a four socket, four-core, four-thead 1.6 GHz Intel Itanium server. Arguably, this made the UltraSPARC T1 the world's most powerful general-purpose commercial server processors, when considering multithreaded commercial workloads. ... One customer has published results showing that a MySQL application running on an UltraSPARC T1 server ran 13.5 times faster than on an AMD Opteron server." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1

In October 2007, the T2 made significant improvements ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2 ) - most notably a 10-fold improvement in floating-point throughput.

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Re:Sun Leaks 6-core Intel Xeon, Nehalem Details by peterlaurens on Monday February 25, 2008 @07:58PM (#123497)

UltraSPARCs are rather specialised for general purpose processors - one could make the arguments that GPUs, which massively outperform x86 CPUs several times over in terms of FP performance, were faster even than SPARC, but it's very much a different beast.

Also I haven't looked this up but isn't UltraSPARC much more costly?

Basically: Apples and Oranges etc.

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Re:Sun Leaks 6-core Intel Xeon, Nehalem Details by xirium on Monday February 25, 2008 @10:05PM (#123587)

Given the rising cost of energy, companies include it in the cost of ownership. So, if you had a server which was 13.5 times more powerful and consumed the same energy then you'd definitely save money. Unfortunately, SPARC would cost more up-front.

So, for a fast growing company, using x86 may reduce opportunity cost. For a large, steady company, a rolling replacement programme of SPARC may be the best option.

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Re:Sun Leaks 6-core Intel Xeon, Nehalem Details by wmf on Monday February 25, 2008 @08:02PM (#123504)

I am aware of Niagara, and I am skeptical that it will beat Nehalem. Certainly a Nehalem system will beat a Niagara 2 system in most benchmarks for performance and price.

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